The developmental rehearsal for the debut of hearing is marked by massive changes in the membrane properties of hair cells (HCs) and spiral ganglion neurons (SGNs). Whereas the underlying mechanisms for the developing HC transition to mature stage are understood in detail, the maturation of SGNs ...

In healthy humans and other animals, behavioral activity exhibits scale invariance over multiple timescales from minutes to 24 h, whereas in aging or diseased conditions, scale invariance is usually reduced significantly. Accordingly, scale invariance can be a potential marker for health. Given ...

When multiple fingertips experience force sensations, how does the brain interpret the combined sensation? In particular, under what conditions are the sensations perceived as separate or, alternatively, as an integrated whole? In this work, we used a custom force-feedback device to display force ...

The concept of a charge density wave (CDW) permeates much of condensed matter physics and chemistry. CDWs have their origin rooted in the instability of a one-dimensional system described by Peierls. The extension of this concept to reduced dimensional systems has led to the concept of Fermi ...

In the Southern Hemisphere, evidence for preindustrial atmospheric pollution is restricted to a few geological archives of low temporal resolution that record trace element deposition originating from past mining and metallurgical operations in South America. Therefore, the timing and the spatial ...

Computation in the brain involves multiple types of neurons, yet the organizing principles for how these neurons work together remain unclear. Information theory has offered explanations for how different types of neurons can maximize the transmitted information by encoding different stimulus ...

Many diseases are associated with oxidative stress, which occurs when the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) overwhelms the scavenging ability of an organism. Here, we evaluated the carbon nanoparticle antioxidant properties of poly(ethylene glycolated) hydrophilic carbon clusters ...

24-Feb-2015 | Nicole Tichenor, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences current issue, 2015

In PNAS, Eshel et al. (1) present a novel methodology for calculating a suite of ecological impacts from livestock and poultry production in the United States. The authors acknowledge two complementary and valuable approaches in ecological accounting: bottom up and top down. Top-down analyses, ...

Precisely timed action potentials related to stimuli and behavior have been observed in the cerebral cortex. However, information carried by the precise spike timing has to propagate through many cortical areas, and noise could disrupt millisecond precision during the transmission. Previous ...